The proposal & how it connects to my practice
How I arrived at my question
What I’ve been researching
Key theories & quotes “There are two aspects to this - the business side and the creative side. The eBook is cheap to make once the technology is in place and it is cheap to buy. And you are not limited to a certain number of pages in the way a print-based book is. It doesn't have to be linear in its construction either. The creator can make different 'branches' or routes; for example, the reader can tap on a door to take one route or tap on another to follow a different narrative. [...]
"Consumers may not like to admit that they are paying to be manipulated, but that's the truth. The worst thing you can do as a designer/writer is to create something that leaves the player unaffected emotionally. In other words, the last thing you should be is boring. It's better in all honesty to create something that makes the players angry than to leave them unaffected [...]“
The eBook isn't about winning or losing. It's about an 'exploration', an experience, rather like a pop-ip book. What many publishers are doing wrong at the moment is just copying printed picturebooks on to this format, which does both media a disservice. It's just like looking at a PDF. Children will simply flick through. A printed picturebook is a particular kind of physical experience that can be savoured an revisited. The eBook need to exploit its own particular characteristics and strengths to evolve as similarly special but distinct experience.”
(Crawford, C. (2013). Chris Crawford on interactive storytelling. Berkeley Calif.: New Riders.)
(Salisbury, M. and Styles, M. (2015). Children's picturebooks. London: Laurence King Publishing.)
Examples & practitioners
Potential direction: what could I research next
-What traditional storytelling is and what makes a good story. - Are people opposed to technology within children's publishing. - How readers connect and relate to characters within a story. - The effects of interactivity and immersion on storytelling. - Does interactivity increase the audience's connection to a story. - How publishers already adapt their content to digital media.
Practitioners I could contact to gain industry insight
Potential practical responses
Put theories to the test by creating stories and integrating different technologies, seeing how readers perceive the different applications of technology. Create multiple iterations of the same short story using different technologies, then have various test groups give their opinions on how the story was affected and how it affected them.
How this could affect my practice